

com⋅press
[v. kuh
m-pres; n. kom-pres]
| 1. | to press together; force into less space. |
| 2. | to cause to become a solid mass: to compress cotton into bales. |
| 3. | to condense, shorten, or abbreviate: The book was compressed by 50 pages. |
| 4. | Medicine/Medical. a soft, cloth pad held in place by a bandage and used to provide pressure or to supply moisture, cold, heat, or medication. |
| 5. | an apparatus for compressing cotton bales. |
| 6. | a warehouse for storing cotton bales before shipment. |
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
Cite This Source
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source
Compress
Com*press"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Compressed; p. pr & vb. n. Compressing.] [L. compressus, p. p. of comprimere to compress: com- + premere to press. See Press.]1. To press or squeeze together; to force into a narrower compass; to reduce the volume of by pressure; to compact; to condense; as, to compress air or water. Events of centuries . . . compressed within the compass of a single life. --D. Webster. The same strength of expression, though more compressed, runs through his historical harangues. --Melmoth. 2. To embrace sexually. [Obs.] --Pope. Syn: To crowd; squeeze; condense; reduce; abridge.Compress
Com"press\, n. [F. compresse.] (Surg.) A folded piece of cloth, pledget of lint, etc., used to cover the dressing of wounds, and so placed as, by the aid of a bandage, to make due pressure on any part.Cite This Source
compress
[Unix] vt. When used without a qualifier, generally refers to crunching of a file using a particular C implementation of compression by Joseph M. Orost et al. and widely circulated via Usenet; use of crunch itself in this sense is rare among Unix hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, "IEEE Computer", vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8-19.Cite This Source
compress
Cite This Source
Main Entry: 1com·press
Pronunciation: k&m-'pres
Function: transitive verb
1 : to press or squeeze together compressing a nerve>
2 : to reduce in size or volume as if by squeezing <compress air>
Main Entry: 2com·press
Pronunciation: 'käm-"pres
Function: noun
1 : a covering consisting usually of a folded cloth that isapplied and held firmly by the aid of a bandage over a wound dressing to prevent oozing
2 : a folded wet or dry cloth applied firmly to a part (as to allay inflammation)
Cite This Source
compress com·press (kŏm'prěs')
n.
A soft pad of gauze or other material applied with pressure to a part of the body to control hemorrhage or to supply heat, cold, moisture, or medication to alleviate pain or reduce infection. v. com·pressed, com·press·ing, com·press·es (kəm-prěs')
To press or squeeze together.
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Cite This Source
compress
1. To feed data through any compression algorithm.
2.
Unix compress was written in C by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods et al., and was widely circulated via Usenet. It uses the Lempel-Ziv Welch algorithm and normally produces files with the suffix ".Z".
Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine-bit codes are output until they are all used. When this occurs, ten-bit codes are used and so on, until an implementation-dependent maximum is reached.
After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is checked. If it is decreasing then the entire string table is discarded and information is collected from scratch.
Cite This Source